Googlers angry about CEO’s $226M pay after cuts in perks and 12,000 layoffs
arstechnica.comGot to give it to Larry Page and Sergey Brin for having their cake and also eating it.
They control ~51% of voting power with shares thanks to owning ~85% of class B shares. They have had the benefit of someone else running the company for 8 years - and increasing the value of it - and now, when things are not looking great, it’s Sundar Pichai who gets the blame, and the focus on his compensation: and not those who set/approved this compensation.
The biggest winners of Pichai’s leadership have objectively been the shareholders: Google’s market cap increased by ~$890B since he took over as CEO in 2015, tripling the market cap/stock price of the company.
Larry and Sergey run this show: they simply hired someone else to do it for them. When things go well: they profit. When not so well - like now - someone else is on the hook and is the person criticised for how things go at Google; and it’s not them.
While all valid points, the current outrage is driven by the spiking CEO pay while making significant cut backs, this is all set against a wider landscape of belt tightening, a looming recession and the observation that CEOs are earning historically high pay ratios.
Those high ratios led Apple shareholders to request a pay cut of their CEO, and that was without poor performance or firing workers.
My take on the OP’s comment was that his salary and bonuses are controlled by the board. As Sergei and Larry have majority control he would not have gotten this without their explicit approval.
Do you think the board would object to him saying "oh yeah this looks bad since we're cutting costs, let's lower my compensation a little."
It's not like he doesn't have any agency in this.
There is no reasonable amount by which he could cut his compensation that wouldn't result in whiners complaining that "well, that wasn't enough of a cut!”
If he's going to catch heat for it anyway, he might as well take what he's being offered.
They could set it to zero, which would be in-line with severity of laying off of 10+ year high performers or those who are pregnant or on medical leave. I'd like to see an automatic condition where layoffs trigger a requirement that the directors and officers compensation will be set to zero for the next three years. You're basically severely fucking with people's lives and this has very real consequences for those people and society in general who has to pick up the pieces.
They can definitely survive for a few years without salary too. 200M is be enough to last most people decades and more yet they get that much every year
200M is enough to last any person intergenerationally along with their children and grandchildren. Not disagreeing with you, just a point of emphasis.
You're 100% correct, honestly I was just trying not to come off as being too hyperbolic
The average tenure of corporate CEOs is what <7 years? Why the hell would you intentionally cut your pay knowing you have a short half in the gig and for doing the job you were hired to do?
For some people, enough money is enough money and you start to think about your legacy. Or maybe your coworkers that toil for so much less. Will another $200m make any difference at all for someone with that kind of money?
Those people don't end up at the top mostly. You need a unending thirst of money and power to make it as CEO of Google and stay there. The same happens in politics actually.
how long do regular workers stay on average at a company? 7 years is a pretty long time
Most regular workers leave generally it’s on their own accord. When a corporate CEO leaves, it’s generally because they are fired.
If I am working for a company where the role I am in has a statistical likelihood that I will be fired in the near future, I am going to take every comp dollar I can get and not offer any compensation sacrifices for optics sake.
> [Pichai]'s salary and bonuses are controlled by the board
That is true of any CEO pay, though.
Your argument does not negate OP's argument.
I don’t understand what OP is arguing but would be interested to find out.
Who is on the board ? Often CEOs float around between boards, they are almost never going to decrease the pay or not raise it, unlike how it works for the rest of us.
Too often correct. But in a case where Founder1 and Founder2 have absolute majority voting control, the Board is extremely unlikely to play such "obviously we'll vote to give each other raises" games. They are sitting in those cushy Board seats - or not - at 1 & 2's whim.
>Those high ratios led Apple shareholders to request a pay cut of their CEO, and that was without poor performance or firing workers.
It was also a pay cut from a TCTC (Tim Cook total compensation) high of $99 million the year before, which seems mindbogglingly high but also make him out to be a bargain in comparison to Pichai.
> the current outrage is driven by the spiking CEO pay while making significant cut backs,
Imagine CEO pay wasn't high.
They would still be reaping a huge portion of the benefit of shareholder-friendly (and less employee-friendly) policies, but escaping the blame.
Effectively, the amount of capital appreciation they've squeezed from layoffs dwarfs the CEO pay package, without any scrutiny.
Google performed only slightly better than QQQ in the past 5 years, and performed significantly worse than AAPL. Tim Cook doesn't get that comp, if that's what you mean.
I thought he got paid more?
I thought he got paid more?
According to this†, he made $99.4 million last year, but will get $49 million this year.
That's 80% less than Pichai.
† https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/app...
Part of it is that Google's exec compensation is oddly structured. His compensation for the previous year was $6 million, though that still makes him better compensated than Cook.
Pichai's pay is on a 3 year cycle.
No it isn't, Pichai will make about $75m/yr.
Doesn’t Laurene Powell Jobs still hold 5.5% of AAPL through the Steve Jobs Trust?
Did you reply to the correct comment?
Do they? I'm sure they run something, but I'm not sure they're the ones telling Pichai constantly which services to cut. To launch Stadia, to kill Stadia, to get Pichais buddy to take over Google Pay, to fire Pichais buddy who runs Google Pay.
Maybe they are micromanaging nightmare bosses, I wouldn't know. But from all I have seen, from the very start of Pichais tenure, he definitely deserves a huge chunk of the blame.
I don't think that Google's market cap increased by ~$890B because of Pichai, it increased despite him.
Yes. This is correlation, not causation. He has been focused on diversification away from ads and hasn't been performing especially well.
His pay is likely set years in advance, based on performance metrics. Sundar is riding the ads wave to huge payouts in spite of his massive failures, Google Plus, Stadia, devices, especially ChromeOS tablets, mismanaging Cloud, and on, and on...
I will gladly take the role of whipping boy off of Sundar's hands.
A week would be enough, then I would retire.
Exactly—I think Larry and Sergey are overpaying their CEO, not just for moral, "it's unfair to pay the boss while we fire the employees" reasons, but for business reasons: what's the cost of a replacement-level CEO? Is Sundar really firing Google employees more effectively than anyone else who might take that job? As noted in sibling comments, he gets paid significantly more than Tim Cook.
Isn't taking the blame part of why CEOs get paid millions of dollars? 226 of them in this case. Pichai signed up for it and is objectively a winner too.
I’ll take some blame for $226m.
What you’ve said is nonsensical. Being the victim of some harsh words forgotten the next day while never having to work another day in your life is not any kind of responsibility.
> What you’ve said is nonsensical.
These are strong words, and you didn't back them up at all.
The comment you're replying to did not mention responsibility at all. Responsibility and blame are different things.
If I were a little less charitable I'd have said your comment was nonsensical.
That would only hold water if they ever actually had to face consequences.
Do well? Get a massive bonus!
Do poorly? Get a massive bonus!
Do incredibly poorly? Leave with a golden parachute (aka massive bonus).
How is this different from any other public company, where employees are not the majority shareholders? Like, what is special about Page and Brin?
Neither of them have to be CEO. So Page and Brin can reward the CEO for being ruthless in a down market and also have Sundar be the scapegoat for them. The “cake” is their stock going up. “Eating it too” is the CEO scapegoat.
This situation doesn't seem different from any other board of directors. Who cares about Page and Brin?
With controlling the majority of the votes, other shareholders have no ability to vote out the board. This isn’t about them being on the board. It is about their absolute control of saying who is on the board.
Why would other shareholders vote out the board? There's no reason to think their interests wouldn't align with Page and Brin.
Do you think Blackrock has substantially different motivations? Like, come on.
Let me introduce you to a new concept.
I call it "Not Everyone Is Motivated Solely By Money."
You didn't fully understand the post you're replying to.
Is your position that the institutional investors which comprise >60% of GOOG's common shares (eg Blackrock) have a significantly different motivation?
Of course not. Don't be ridiculous.
It might just be me, but aren’t they all filthy rich, excessively profiting from their workers, handing them selves extreme wealth, while cutting their workers off from this wealth.
This is exploitation. The owning class for the owning class. The rich benefit and the workers are left exploited. Larry, Sergey, Pichai, they are all participating and benefiting at the cost of the workers. Any in-fighting and rivalry is at best a spectacle. At the end of the day, they all go home to the wealth, earned by their workers but enjoyed by the owners, and the owners alone, whether you call them bosses or shareholders, they are all simply exploiters.
Here's the world's smallest violin to those poor Google engineers who have some of the highest compensation in tech.
First of all, I don’t care if they are well payed, their bosses and shareholders are still taking more profits than they deserve.
Second, Google’s workers famously include many many contractors who do not get the same benefits as Google’s direct employees. This is exploitation.
Third, the exploitation runs deeper than just google workers. Their customers include companies which are paying a bunch of money to use their services. This is money which otherwise could have gone to the developers of those customers. Those workers are also exploited by google’s bosses and shareholders.
Well seeing constantly degrading quality of Google products, I would say that Google engineers also taking more compensation than they deserve.
While the system certainly has its flaws, calling them 'simply exploiters' ignores the immense value they've created and the hard work required to build a company like Google.
The rich benefit and the workers are left exploited.
Good grief.
The highest paid workers on the planet, work for google. You should spread this communist blather at the proper place, coffee shops where workers aren't paid a living wage.
Not people able to retire wealthy, is they invest their salary coreectly.
Talk about entitlement.
They are still paid a tiny fraction of the value they generate while a handful of people receive most of the value generated.
I don't think anyone here is advocating for cutting Pichai's pay to $500k or something, but nearly a quarter of a billion dollars? JFC
I don’t see any reason to suggest that the CEO’s pay here is some failing of the market. Google’s owners felt it was appropriate to pay the CEO that amount, and it doesn’t really affect the pay or well being of Google’s other employees, who are/were some of the highest paid already.
From a class perspective, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, they are all equally guilty of exploitation. Board of directors agree pay their CEOs excessive salary, and the CEO in turns keeps this money away from the workers and away from the customers. Stock prices remain high, bank accounts in Panama fill up, workers gets fired, bosses get rich.
For me “Market rate” is just something the owning class tells us to gaslight us into accepting our exploitation. They created this market, they control this market, and exploiters go on exploiting.
Well under your definition the whole capitalist system is just masked exploitation. If that’s the case then I don’t think this is any more egregious an instance of exploitation than the every day income disparities already happening.
What benefit does a board of directors have over helping out the CEO (an employee as well) vs customers and employees?
You are not wrong. Books have been written about how the whole capitalist system is just masked exploitation—including a very famous one by one Karl Marx in 1867. But you must see the scale at play here. When bosses are getting millions upon millions of dollars, hundreds of millions even, and shareholders are in the billions, this is capitalism turned to eleven (and don’t get me wrong capitalism turned to 1 is still bad for workers).
> What benefit does a board of directors have over helping out the CEO (an employee as well) vs customers and employees?
Note I say workers. Even though a CEO is technically “employed” by the company, they are still very much a boss, a part of the owning class, and part of the problem. When the pitchforks come up, they will very much be directed at CEOs. This is why CEOs help out their fellow bosses and shareholders. Class solidarity is very much a reality for the owning and ruling classes.
Hello, the 19th Century is calling and they want their economics back.
They "generate" the value by putting software on multi-billion dollar server farms, while sitting in buildings on top of billions worth of real estate. Did they pay for those and keep them running?
This is why this country sucks, no one wants people to be paid adequately if it's more than they make. Talk about crab bucket mentality.
You can have a standard for maximum fair wage without it being some kind of personal irrational gripe.
Those wages are what middle class is due to inflation.
Stop wanting everyone to be as poor as you god damn. I want employees to make as much as they can, not all the wealth concentrate in a capital class. WTF is wrong with people?
If an employee makes enough money they aren't middle class. And if a CEO is getting paid normally then they're an employee too.
Also I was thinking in terms of math applied to percentiles and other statistics, which don't change with inflation.
Are you really going to say it's crab bucket if I say a number like "a million dollars" and say it should apply to both income and capital gains? Maybe even a lower number for capital gains, if I'm being feisty?
I actually like to use worker class and owning class. Bosses (including CEOs) are apart of the owning class. CEOs being employers is just semantics, they are still bosses, and is the reason I use the word workers to make it clear.
Well paid google workers are still workers and deserve our solidarity. Making a distinction among workers between lower classes, and middle and upper class only serves to divide us, destroy our solidarity, and for our bosses to keep exploiting us.
How many workers get more than a million dollars, keeping the same example threshold? It barely affects solidarity.
And why shouldn't I have some solidarity with an owner of a business that has 30k more assets than debts and personally makes 40k a year?
I think income and wealth are better distinguishers than the role you have.
Google runs coffeeshops with low paid workers.
>it’s Sundar Pichai who gets the blame
Unpopular opinion, but he should. Google has pretty much been uninventing cesspool since he became the CEO. The only thing that are up are profits.
Yes, and he gets paid royally to be the one that gets criticized.
And? How do we know how happy are they?
> The biggest winners of Pichai’s leadership have objectively been the shareholders:
Literally his job. End of story.
Not sure I'm following. They aren't getting new equity grants, they're de-facto out of the picture and just riding the valuation. They have 51% voting power but it's not obvious they are actively making decisions, rather than just holding onto power in just-in-case.
Sundar is getting new equity grants based on his "performance". That's not the same.
Larry and Sergey have 51% voting power. They are the ones deciding how much Sundar is paid. Put it the other way: if they don’t want to pay him that much: they have the power to do so.
As the ultimate owners of the company by shareholder votes, they approved the compensation of Sundar, and are the decision makers.
no, they need to compete with other companies for the talent pool of CEOs. There is a market for such leaders, and if they drop the pay too low they will not get the same quality CEO, and they won't incentivize the CEO they have to the same extent.
> they will not get the same quality CEO
Hah!
Larry and Sergey hired Sundar to do a job (make money for shareholders aka Larry and Sergey). If Sundar doesn’t want to do that job anymore they’ll find someone else to do it better.
If I’m ignoring morality and just pretending I own the company and want to be richer, my opinion would be: if I think there is someone out there who will do a better job than my CEO and they are available, hire them no matter how much it costs. Whatever I’m paying them is peanuts compared to their impact on the company’s market cap. Nowhere in my option space is “keep the same sub-par CEO but pay them less”, that’s penny-wise and pound-foolish thinking.
Do you truly think there is no one on earth who could do a better job than Pinchai for, let's say, $80M a year? $40M a year? $30M a year? $10M a year? Why is there downward pressure on wages for everyone except for this particular position?
If that person who can do a better job exists and can be identified, we should hire them and not waste time worrying about how much they are paid. It’s more important somebody else doesn’t hire them first.
Btw if you have some repeatable mechanism for proving the suitability of CEO candidates, maybe you should be doing executive recruiting for a liking.
On what basis are people saying that he's responsible for the company's increase in valuation over the past 8 years? For all we know he's just sitting in his office twiddling his thumbs.
If I own Google, I’m not willing to run the experiment of hiring a thumb-twiddler to run my trillion-dollar company to save a few hundred million dollars. I’m willing to pay an extra hundred million dollars to hire someone who appears to be 1% less likely to be a thumb-twiddler, even though I don’t have an oracle that can measure candidates perfectly. If that oracle existed, the market wage would probably be 11 figures instead of 9.
In reality, there are few people who have had to opportunity to show their ability to run Google. You have the small set of people who ran tech companies as big as Google, or who ran big parts of Google. Those people are in high demand, which is why 9 figures is the market rate for the most appealing of the bunch.
Risk? He's a known quantity. There may be 1000 guys more capable than Pichai. Alas, there are at least two thorny questions:
* How do you find one of these guys in the haystack with any degree of confidence?
* How much time would one of them need to build a professional network at the same level as Pichai?
FWIW, I do find these compensation packages obscene. Just working out same thinly disguised math.
His pay is huge, but not huge when spread across 12K people. You couldn't keep them employed on $250M/3yrs
Perhaps not all of them, but you could certainly choose to keep some.
On the other hand, perhaps you could. Just dividing the numbers out doesn’t account for whatever value they’re producing.
I don't really understand the point you are trying to make.
CEO doesn't get a raise without it being okay with shareholders
Never underestimate the power of the veto. Those who hold it, certainly don’t.
You can’t really blame Sundar, his job is to keep the shareholders happy.
How can we account for inflation when we say market cap increased by $xB? How can we differentiate an actual increase in value as opposed to currency debasement?
You measure it as beta against something broad like the total market or the S&P500.
If the currency gets debased and money flows into the market wouldn’t it also just debase the S&P500 equally?
It would debase the S&P500 equally, so any difference between Google's performance and S&P500 performance is clearly caused by something else then inflation/debasement/etc.
In comparison, Nadella is a bit above $50M which is gross underpay considering how Ballmer left the company. Nadella has been the best CEO in the past decade. In fact, you could argue that he’s the best investment manager in the past decade since MSFT is now a giant technology conglomerate. Better than Berkshire.
Such hyperbole. Apple is superior in every financial metric. I don’t know how anyone can say this with a straight face while apple exists.
Such hyperbole. Saudi Aramco is superior in every financial metric. I don’t know anyone can say this with a straight face while Aramco exists.
(Since we’re bringing up companies nobody else mentioned)
Yes, Aramco is a competitor to apple.
If you think about it, every company is a competitor because they’re all competing for money
And resources at some level.
What did Tim actually accomplish though? He’s there to essentially “keep” what Apple already established under Steve Jobs. Nadella made some big decisions to completely remake Microsoft.
By the way, return (not including dividends) is about the same between AAPL and MSFT since Nadella took over on February 2014 which is simply amazing if you think about the differences between the two companies.
You probably don't know or don't care, but there is more to running a company than producing a new hardware product line (which is important of course too).
Under Tim Cook, Apple's business functions (procurement, manufacturing, operations, financing, retail) had an incredible change in efficiency and cash generating capability. Also, you may notice that Apple Services are an incredibly large and profitable business in their own right, having grown from nothing about a decade ago.
You probably don’t know or don’t care, but most of Apple’s current logistic/infrastructure was built under Steve. Steve’s connections in China played a big role in accomplishing that.
You realize that Tim Cook and not Steve Jobs was responsible for thar right as the COO? SJ had nothing to do with that.
Really? Steve Jobs had NOTHING to do with iPhone logistics.
Interesting. Do you know that for fact? Were you at Apple and involved in the process?
It's sad that when I'm trying to search interviews with Tim Cook I can't find these interesting things that he has done. He knows so much about supply chain management and all he is asked about is privacy.
I was. Were you?
May be evading taxes by cheating is a great thing to get praised.
Why downplay Tim Cook? If it is so obvious what to do why isn’t Microsoft a bigger company?
Why make disruptive changes? Stay the course and refine. That’s apple, and that’s why they’re the biggest.
That’s also why they didn’t foolishly overhire and why layoffs were not necessary for them.
And finally, why wouldn’t include dividends? SMH
I am not downplaying Tim at all. He’s good at what he does but he and Nadella is not on the same level in terms of accomplishments. Tim was handed a silver platter that is iPhone. Nadella completely changed Microsoft.
Apple literally has updated all of their Macs to a new architecture. While competing with tens of vendors in every product category at a variety of price points. You are being absolutely ridiculous. Apple is literally stealing market share from Microsoft in every product category in which they compete.
Not to mention the Apple Watch.
They quite literally put SOCs they started developing under Steve in Macs. You cannot be serious and think Tim Cook spearheaded M1 chip development. He’s a logistic and operations guy. He’s not a visionary.
I’ll credit Tim with giving Jony the boot and getting MagSafe back on my Mac.
Apple not but three years ago transitioned their entire Mac lineup to a brand new architecture. That could have been disastrous.
Except Mac sales account for less than 10% of their revenue, and as of Q2 this year are down 31%. If they completelyt disappeared it would be bad without anything like disastrous. If you're going to give credit to Tim Cook for doing something original point to boring, unsexy services: over $20B this quarter and 3x that brought in by Macs, with better margins.
Cook was fundamental for Apple in becoming the company it is today. The stuff he has done in there, regarding logistics and operations, its real innovation on its own.
I sympathize more w/ Nadella, but I would think that Cook is an even greater CEO than him.
Sure it can be objectively good even if another is even better
Ya but the word used was best
Microsoft PE ratio: 33
Apple PE ratio: 28
Comparing any tech CEO's pay to Buffett's is silly. Buffett built Berkshire from scratch over 50+ years through incredibly savvy investments. Nadella inherited a tech giant and has kept the momentum going, but the scale and difficulty aren't really comparable.
Nadella is the scottie pippen of tech ceos.
Well the 226m vests over 3 years. So it's not so bad.
I said this in another thread complaining about Pichai:
2019 Net Income - $36B
2022 Net Income - $60B
If was part of the workforce I would be even more pissed just at the company itself. Laying off 12k and cuts in perks after $60B in net income.
Ah, but Google announced a $70B stock buyback, so in a sense, isn't that a net loss of $10B, requiring belt tightening and layoffs?
> was part of the workforce I would be even more pissed just at the company itself. Laying off 12k and cuts in perks after $60B in net income.
This cuts both ways. How many of those laid off had any connection to that profit?
I don't think this is a good argument. Just because you are at a cost center/not at a profit center doesn't mean you don't have any connection to the profit.
Take HR. Total cost center. By this logic they shouldn't get any piece of the pie. But in reality, without *good* HR, a company can be a shitty place to work. HR is just one example. Many others out there.
Not referring to cost centres within profitable units. Much of Google was professional yarn spinning. That doesn’t make the layoffs or pay disparity okay. But I’d squint at someone in a group that shipped a product a week, each with a year’s lifespan, complaining about that profit like it’s relevant to them.
You don't lay off people (or avoid doing so) because you have large or small profits, quite the opposite, you have the profits you do because you do (or don't do) lay off people when it makes economic sense to do so.
The decision whether laying off those 12000 people improves or hurts the company is the same no matter if you have $60B net income or $6B net loss. Being hugely profitable doesn't make it worth keeping more people than you need, just as having losses doesn't make it worth firing people you do need.
> Being hugely profitable doesn't make it worth keeping more people than you need, just as having losses doesn't make it worth firing people you do need.
I understand this is the thinking that runs the economy, and it's very much a shame. With 12k unneeded people you think the work they were doing disappears? No, the people still there (that brought in records profits) now get to shoulder that work.
Do you think all 12k of those people were the worst or maybe some were older and more experiences, being paid better than a recent college grad? It's just pure greed and the people there should be pissed off at the CEO and the board.
Significant portions of companies like google are parallel structures unrelated to revenue and body shops piled high to buy localised political influence.
Also, layoffs fight inflation which fights higher rates. Low rates would mean amazing things for tech stocks.
The $226M is over the next 3 years, so it's approximately $75M/yr. For comparison, this is a decrease from his last grant of $281M in 2019, or $94M/yr. It's a 20% cut in salary for the next three years in a row.
For comparison, Tim Cook made $99M in 2022, and was cut to $49M "target compensation" in 2023 (but he can actually make more, e.g. his 2022 wound up 18% higher than target), and the following 2 years remain to be decided.
So sure Googlers can be angry, but it seems like the message is getting lost that this is compensation for 3 years (not 1) and a meaningful decrease (not increase). It could well wind up being an even bigger decrease than Tim Cook's over the next 3 years, yet Tim is getting praise for taking a cut while people are angry at Sundar?
Seems like the real problem might be that Google makes 3-year CEO grants that people then totally misunderstand.
So if they paid him 0$ they could have kept 500-1,000 out of those 12,000 employees? And that's assuming none of his pay was redistributed to any of the employees they kept. That's the thing with these gigantic numbers, they always look really impressive, but when you divide them by the actual number of employees involved it's not a huge per-employee benefit. Not saying it's fair, just that if you stare starry eyed at the number thinking cutting out the top would make a huge difference in you're life, you're mistaken.
Were you trying to say 500-1000 of the employees isn't a huge number?
Well, turn it around. Instead of letting go of 12,000 people, if they cut his salary to zero the they would “only” have let go of 11,000.
Nevertheless, I still think the outrage is justified. Just not on financial grounds.
It's roughly 4%. I would not call 4% of anything huge.
That's just an absurd statement. If there was a new airline that said, "Only 4% of our flights end in crashes" -- I think you'd avoid it at all costs.
Another way to look at his pay -- is he worth 4X what Satya is? Is he having 4X the positive impact at Google as what Satya is at Microsoft?
Or another way to put it, what if you ONLY paid him $50M and kept 400 engineers (assuming they weren't laying off underperformers) -- would they be better off?
Consensus is that a 4% APR on a savings account is huge...
Seeing that Google has failed at every single initiative outside of ads, employees aren’t what they need. They need a vision.
As I get older and (hopefully) wiser, I’ve come to the conclusion that vision is about 50% of success, and getting that vision to market - execution - is the other 50%.
The moment you lose the vision or drop the ball, you’re doomed.
Now recalculate by using also additionally authorized 70B of stock buybacks to float the stocks that make those 220mil.
"It's almost like they care more about shareholders than Googlers."
The C-suite works for the board and the major shareholders. They'll immediately throw workers under the bus if told to do so. That's their job. They'll be fired if they don't. They knew it from day one.
Tech workers better hope that rate hikes stop soon, otherwise CEOs might take Musk as inspiration.
Almost everybody agrees that his actions are extreme and often stupendous. But that's not the point. The point is that he fired 80% and Twitter is still operational.
Also, Twitter 5 times smaller than before seems to fairly rapidly change/add features, whilst old Twitter never shipped anything.
Nobody should adapt these crazy tactics, but it's an (extreme) demonstration of fluff and discovering core value. You don't have to go Musk mode, but Musk demonstrated the effect of a decimation of the work force.
That suggests to CEOs that one might go half-Musk mode. There's a lot of room to cut when you previously hired entire villages each year. Not 80%. But 30%? Why not. 40%? Maybe.
Consider Facebook's "year of optimization". They hired so many people that it takes them a year to figure our what all these people are even doing. What you have normalized as "normal times" were in fact dot com boom times.
Google’s board has spoken, and the price of their stock today matters more than the company’s future.
If I was an employee who cared about Google’s vision, or what other services they could offer the world, the I’d probably be angry at the squandered opportunity too.
Google is acting rationally. The products produced by these massively compensated employees in their 10s of thousands have failed to meaningfully add value beyond Search. Other Bets, X, Brain, DeepMind, etc, etc. All have failed over the last 20 years. Just good money after bad. So, the rational thing to do is cut costs and harvest profits.
How many product managers, marketers, TPMs, DEI personnel, and layers and layers of directors and VPs does Google need to keep Search cranking? Answer: far, far fewer.
Do you think the failure was tactical failures or strategic failures? Other companies seem to bring new categories of business with success. Why could Microsoft launch a game platform and be successful but google couldn’t? Why is an e-commerce company leading cloud computing?
My best guess is culture. Google's perks went from a means to allow employees to work longer and harder to an entitlement that actually undermined productivity. It also appears they allowed internal activists to distract and delay the release of various tech–LLMs, for example, that would have given them a multi-year lead. Again, too many do-nothing marketers, PMs, DEI bureaucrats, TPMs, Directors and VPs, not enough actual builders. Maybe this is the blood letting Google needs to get it back into gear.
You can't just give people "stuff" to do without a clear direction.
You need strong leaders with vision and commitment. And if the leaders can't stomach the risk of failing hard, well, that's how you end up with Google of the past ~15 years.
If they were angry enough, they’d unionize.
A union doesn't protect against layoffs.
It does.
As an employee of a publically traded software company, I can never understand why people feel entitled to their job. I sell my time to my employer and either party can back out of that transaction
Many people (including me) left their home country, family and lot of times their possible dating life with a person who speaks their own language to be able to work at Google.
For me it wasn't just about salary, but I really believed in the vision Eric Schmidt was selling (don't be evil). Since then Google is just going down in morals and renegged on its own promises.
I'm sorry you did. 20 years ago when I was young and naive I was very strong in ideologies too. In my case it was Linux and open source. I defended it blindly for a time.
As I've grown up, now at 40 I understand more things about the world. In the case of private companies, I learned long ago not to get enamoured with them. Unless I am the owner, I work only for my paycheck. I've been in great companies, and some of them have paid me dearly. And I will always do my best for what I am paid.
But long gone are my days of pushing myself even sacrificing my health, family relationships and personal wellbeing for a company. In the end, they can and will fire me tomorrow if it improves the bottom line.
Actually Google was amazing in those times and didn't fire anybody in the 2008 recession that I lived through. Eric Schmidt was focusing on a vision where we can do great things, 20% project was real (I had one), which of course just meant extra work, as it didn't help in promotions (something I had to learn of course as an idealist).
I would do this part again, but what I didn't realize at that time is that with 5x higher salary than before I should have spent much more money on balancing the disadvantages of living in a place where the local language is impossible to learn (Swiss German in Zurich).
What is the actual point of giving anyone $226m in pay? How would that motivate them to deliver any more..? Ratio of CEO:staff pay at 1000:1!
It's not to motivate a particular person to deliver more, it's to ensure that you're able to hire that person - if they would pay, for example, $2million, then no one with experience at managing decent size tech companies would apply as they can get a much better offer elsewhere.
Also, CEO compensation is effectively between the shareholders and the CEO - if the CEO is making the shareholders happy and they want to gift him $200m for no good reason, well, it's their right to do so, it's their money to spend or waste as they wish, not the employee's.
By doing so, don't you restrict the pool of talent that you can hire from?
Why does Buffett get up and go to work in the morning?
Why would someone work for $250m but not work for $150m? Or at that level of wealth work for free.
Surely it's just for keeping score
By why would someone work for $150m when they can get $250m? The pool of CEOs that can successfully run billion dollar companies is pretty tiny.
The question isn't whether someone would work for $250m but would not work for $150m; the question is whether someone would or wouldn't work for you for that amount. If someone else offers $200m to the same person, they would work for you for $250m and wouldn't work for you for $150m.
Why would the money come it to it rather than the challenge, opportunity, colour of the carpet in the hall, etc
Mr Buffett is 92 years old and works every day and is worth approx $120 billion.
In the past 70 years hes had more money than needed for him to decide to give it all up. Why hasn't he?
Why are you asking this question? Is it rhetorical, and if so, what point do you feel you are making?
Why are you asking that question? The post to which i replied was asking why someone who has made that much money would continue working.
You were the one that asked that.
Which post asked that
So his salary is irrelevant, whether he is paid $1 or $1b a year makes no difference to his lifestyle.
It's sad really
Some people are so poor, all they have is money
Warren Buffets salery has been $100.000 for decades. And as far as I know Berkshire doesn't do stock based compensation at all, Buffet just holds the shares he always held.
To beat competitors, not have tons of beemers for beemer sake. The motivation is relative. The 3 big "robber barons" of the late 1800's use to send each other brag-grams over who was richer.
Certainly not because he needs to work for a living, or for anything at all.
Certainly not for money, he lives in a simple house and drives a simple car. Probably because he just likes his job
To keep score.
While I agree that CEOs are overpayed, I think the same applies to software engineers. Software Engineering has been a pay/perk bubble for years that was due for a correction, and like when Elon cut the free gourmet lunches and coffees for Twitter staff, I'm sure the Google engineers will survive.
Meanwhile Google's "raters", the army of workers who do the hard work of moderating and testing Google's platforms are getting paid crumbs in comparison: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/25/1166059832/googles-ghost-work...
Show me another profession that can have such a dramatic impact on the bottom line where your work makes the company 100x-1000x your salary. If anything SWE are underpaid, we should be getting a slice of total business unit revenue.
With my last job doing SWE for a bank, I know for a fact that my code saved the company hundreds of thousands dollars just from one project, and I know for a fact that some of my other code oversaw over a billion dollars in loan volume annually.
And what do I get come review time? No salary change and a variable bonus. It's fucking bullshit. These motherfuckers are getting rich off my back and they don't even share. Even 5% of revenue split across my entire team would be a million-plus or everyone, but nooooooooo we cant have that now can we? Whatever will the pathetic shareholders ever do then???
You're discounting the people that identified the opportunity, scoped out and defined the project, and then briefed you about what was needed.
Sales, Marketing, and GTM are absolutely generating 100x - 1000x their salary if they take sole ownership of a project like you are doing.
SWEs are good are solving problems, but other people determine which problems to pay attention to, and how much investment to make in them.
In some companies, yes. In other engineering-driven companies it's the other way around.
In many organizations, marketing is just asking customers what they want. E.g. ask a farmer from the turn of the century, they'd have said "I want a horse that pulls harder and eats less oats!"
They'd never have said "I want a tractor!"
It's Engineers that conceive of tractors.
Every time I hear this horse argument I picture a horse that is as strong as 1000 horses and goes 300 miles per hour and I get really sad that they invented cars instead of just giving people what they wanted.
But remember the horse shit you'd need to deal with.
Correction, that YOU would have to deal with. I’ll be three hundred miles away looking for oats.
That being said: you are absolutely right. How quickly the externalities are forgotten.
Hard disagree. Marketers conceive of tractors.
They are the ones by talking to the customers and knowing what they need. They are the ones that know that one engineer has been working on a high power engine, and other on rugged, high traction trailers.
Purely engineering firms fail in the long run as they drift away from what buyers want and chase interesting things because they think they know better.
> Purely engineering firms fail in the long run as they drift away from what buyers want and chase interesting things because they think they know better.
Eh, it's not about purely engineering. Many businesses who are not related to engineering fails exact same reason. They only care about short time growth and loses. Happens all the time.
I would’ve agreed with you if you had swapped marketers for product managers.
Marketers coming up with ideas and dictating those ideas to engineers is just wrong
Cough meta cough
Zilog too
There's a straightforward (if not necessarily easy) way to test this hypothesis. Go look at founders and see what fraction are engineers vs project managers vs sales/marketing/business/etc. in their previous careers. Then go look at who is successful and how their success is positively or negatively impacted by their experience.
I haven't run the numbers but I have the impression that "idea people" tend to flounder without a strong technical co-founder. In contrast, technical co-founders can make it on their own, though there may certainly be challenges in doing so. Those roles are also very different in terms of what you can hire in as early employees vs what absolutely has to be a part of the founding team.
Almost everything in a big organization is a team effort, but that doesn't mean you can't tease out the relative contributions of the different parts. And I think you're undervaluing the engineering contribution substantially.
That's an interesting point, but I think having a Founder's or Entrepreneurial mindset is the key to success here and not the founder's professional discipline. It's about the combination of ideas, execution, and money. No single profession owns that.
Lots of successful businesses have been founded and run by founders with no formal engineering training. They all need some level of business knowledge, but that can to some degree be learnt on the job.
I think you’re just making a case that those roles are also underpaid. All of these things can be true.
That is why I said "across my entire team". The numbers are still ridiculous.
A lot of the time those guys are just making magical promises to customers with no idea how what they want could actually work.
Then they throw it to engineering and either take the credit or shift the blame.
>we should be getting a slice of total business unit revenue
Start a company then.
Pay is not determined by value, it's determined by leverage. The CEO pays himself the most money because he controls the company, he's not going to pay anyone lower than him more than he makes.
CEO doesn't "pay himself the most money"; CEO pay is not decided by the company executives but directly by the shareholders/board.
How many companies pay VPs/senior employees more than the CEO outside of hedge funds?
>we should be getting a slice of total business unit revenue
Start a company then.
Or go back in time 40 years.
It used to be very common for companies to give a portion of the yearly profits to the employees. It was called "profit sharing."
Somehow that perk evaporated in the tech industry.
It's publicly traded and they pay RSUs.
The two aren't mutually exclusive.
Well... between Apr 6, 2023 and the time of this post I have single-handedly brought in >1.2MM for the place I work. From initial customer contact to service provided to billing to negotiation (there's always negotiation after billing) to payment received and deposited, me alone. I got a $25 gift card yesterday (along with my [relatively low] regular and overtime pay throughout, of course). And I'm ok with that, tbh. I could get frustrated and envious and bitter, but I also couldn't have done that without the decades of brand awareness and business infrastructure and equipment and facility and support staff keeping all the rest of it going. I see it as that revenue paying the salary of other people so that they can do other things that leave me able to do my part. I refuse to play the "I did the work for this job so I deserve it all" game.
Well, you worked at a bank. Other than a few niche roles like algo trading, banks do not pay SWEs particularly well. Nor are they particularly well respected. You play second or third fiddle to the traders.
SWEs at FAANG and other top tier tech companies are at a completely different level of compensation. I don’t think they’re underpaid.
I worked in Algo trading at a bank. Banks do not pay SWEs that work in algo trading well. I left finance to work in tech and got a 50% bump right off the bat. And I was well paid on my team- the h1s and kids out of school were not breaking 100k. I know the guy sitting in my old seat and 10 years later he is maybe getting that 50% more while I have 4xed. He works 50-60 hour weeks like I did as well and I rarely go past 45.
And this was ten years ago when this stuff was the hot thing. This myth that big banks pay anyone in tech well needs to be dispelled. I worked at a few as well and they were all the same.
Algo trading and even general swe at the top places (e.g. citadel) will pay better than the top tech firms.
The top finance firms like Citadel, Jane Street, Two Sigma, and the like have the best paying tech roles, but also comparatively much fewer of them than FAANG and the top tech companies. They're also extremely difficult to get into. I don't remember where but I read someone saying it's easier to get an offer from all letters of the FAANG pantheon than it is to get an offer from Jane Street.
Also different banks pay better or worse. Goldman is the top of the hierarchy and pays competitively with a mid tier tech company depending on your team and role. JP Morgan is second place.
The rest of the pack (BoA, Citi, UBS, WF, others) probably can't compete with most tech companies.
Agree. Worked in the first group as well and it paid well and legit valued it's employees. The hours became a bit abusive at the end so I followed one of my bosses there to a firm he went to. But that's how I made the jump to 4x.
> Show me another profession that can have such a dramatic impact on the bottom line where your work makes the company 100x-1000x your salary.
High frequency trading / propriety trading firms (buy-side) make FANG TC look like public teacher TC.
400-600K USD for 22-year old new grads. With 5 YOE, TC of $1M+ is not uncommon . If you do really well, $10M+ annual TC is possible with 5-10 YOE.
Even mid-career employees get fixed % cut of company profits. I’m not even talking about the company partners either.
So yes, FANG SWEs are underpaid.
The total number of roles in HFT firms and other top finance companies that pay tech employees that well are tiny compared to the number of roles in FAANG.
Along those lines, the number of SWEs in FAANG are tiny compared to the legions upon legions of SWEs working at nontech companies where a 60yo staff engineer retires with compensation similar to a FAANG 25yo junior engineer.
The comparison is even more dire if you bring non-US jobs into play. I’ve heard a typical Venetian gondolier is paid more than an Italian SWE.
So I disagree a FAANG engineer is underpaid compared to the vast majority of their peers at other companies.
FAANG is an anthill, and HFT firms are a wart on an ant’s thorax compared to the Mt. Everest that comprises the legions of companies that pay far, far less.
You've just described what Marx identified 150 years ago.
I disagree about being overpaid.
Similar to other professions - engineering and medicine for example - we have a career which requires a dedication to constant learning.
We build systems which allow companies to generate billions in revenue and deserve a slice of the pie.
The thing Googlers conveniently leave out is that this multiplier effect that is seen almost nowhere else is not due to super human brilliance, it's build on the backs on all the rest of us. Our information. Our content. Typically provided for free or forcefully soaked up by surveillance tactics.
You're the operator of a machine that exploits on a planetary scale. You might be awesome at operating this machine, but you don't supply the actual value that leads to those billions.
Most engineers earn nothing close to FAANG comp. Even some really great computer scientists who just don't happen to live in the silicon valley bubble don't.
FWIW I'm not at FAANG level or even have a good educational background. If anything FAANG developers skew the statistics for the majority
But you have much lower education and time costs, no?
>In all, it takes about eight to ten years to become a professional engineer, depending on whether you decide to get a master's degree.
>Doctors must complete a four-year undergraduate program, along with four years in medical school and three to seven years in a residency program to learn the specialty they chose to pursue. In other words, it takes between 10 to 14 years to become a fully licensed doctor.
I'm a marketer. I hold a Master's and a couple of Graduate Diplomas. I have a professional designation that requires constant CPD. I spend a significant amount of my time undertaking professional development. I work longer hours and can make a good case that my work has more impact than engineers, and I get paid significantly less than engineers with similar tenure.
I can't see any reasonable argument that engineers are intrinsically worth more, (and I say that as a person that dropped out of Engineering to pursue other opportunities). There might be fewer (good ones) than what the market needs, and this obviously pushes salaries up.
Have you run into a lot of great software engineers that didn't spend at least that many hours working on their own projects? I don't think you could even pass an internship interview if all you did was go to class for 4 years. (Passing the classes is of course predicated on doing a lot of programming outside of class, if only to have some text files to turn in!)
Most of the job training for this field comes from within. Hours, weeks, years alone with a computer. Nobody sees that, and you don't pay someone to administer it to you. But it's absolutely required.
Are you familiar with the medical pathway in the US? Software really isn't comparable for any but maybe the absolute most extreme developers.
1) Premed - 4 year degree + easily 1-2k+ hours spent volunteering, doing research, gaining medical work experience, obtaining LOR, shadowing, MCAT prep etc. This isn't optional if you actually want any chance of being accepted. Fail to get in and you're working with a (typically) biochem bachelors as a lab tech for $12 an hour and no upward mobility outside of grad school.
2) Medical School - another 4 years of pretty much nonstop studying outside mandated classwork and clinicals. Multiple large exams that basically dictate your entire future and whether you'll be able to match (ie. actually work as a doctor ever) along the way. A few thousand fail to match each year and invested 8 years + 250k med school + 50-100k undergrad to go back to that lab tech career I mentioned at $12/hr. Keep in mind those student loans are non-dischargable through bankruptcy.
3) Residency - 3-7 years. Family Medicine is one of the least rigorous and shortest at 3 years and averages about 10k hours of on the job during that time making less than minimum wage. Surgery is more like 80+ hours/week for much longer with 28 hour shifts standard at the start (minimum, better hope you don't have to finish any work at the end). Oh and don't fuck up because you literally have lives in your hands and face multi-million dollar lawsuits if you mess up after being awake for 20 hours straight on the job.
At the end of all of this and if you matched the most competitive specialties and busted your ass you might be able to make as much as a senior level SV software dev. Or you might be a pediatrician making 150k/yr if that appeals to you more than being wrist deep in someones bowels all day every day, or getting a 3 AM call to come do neurosurgery, or an urgent heart cath. Not feeling it tonight? Well someone is going to literally die if you aren't there within the next 30m- sleep well.
> Have you run into a lot of great software engineers that didn't spend at least that many hours working on their own projects?
Despite the HN bubble, most developers go to work, do their jobs and go home and don’t think about “side projects”
Yeah, but how do you get your first job? Doctors don't have a job when they go to 12 years of medical school. That's to get the job.
Well, I got my first for pay opportunity because a college about a hour and a half away from mine saw a HyperCard stack I wrote and posted on AOL - it was an improved Eliza clone. He wanted to integrate it into a HyperCard based Gopher server that was in 1994.
Then that led to an internship in 1995 at another company and I got a job there in 1996.
I haven’t written a single line of code “for fun” since then. The only reason I have any type of open source presence now is because my current job has a very straightforward open source process that allows us to get approved to put reusable artifacts from customer engagements on the corporate open source Github organization (https://github.com/aws-samples) under an MIT license.
That means I am free to fork it once it gets approved so it shows up on my own profile.
> Similar to other professions - engineering and medicine for example - we have a career which requires a dedication to constant learning.
So do adjunct professors, and they're paid peanuts.
> We build systems which allow companies to generate billions in revenue and deserve a slice of the pie.
Capitalists don't care what you think you deserve. Their morality says if the labor market situation means they can get away with paying you peanuts, it's righteous for them to do so, regardless if you do things that "allow companies to generate billions in revenue."
The people who care about getting people paid what they deserve will play a tiny violin for you, since most workers have it way, way worse than software engineers have it now.
> we have a career which requires a dedication to constant learning
95% of that is chasing dumb fads, pop cultures, pointless shiny objects, technology fetishes
That's part of it, but there is truly a lot to know in software development, and while people can argue it's not on the same level as doctor, lawyer, and engineer, it's definitely a harder job than most others out there.
Here's a list of the 25 most common jobs in the US according to Indeed: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/most-comm...
I will confidently say Software Developer (# 24 on the list) is a more difficult job than almost all of them.
Yup, but that’s the job. I have an organizational mandate to change deployment stacks every 18 months.
I wish these companies would generate fewer billions in revenue, choosing to make their businesses more beneficial to society as a whole instead of apparently focusing on maximizing profit. It seems like all parties involved could still be quite adequately compensated.
Unfortunately (in my opinion), that's not how it is. Given our reality, I think I agree with you that SWEs do deserve that slice of that pie. But I very much wish that more people placed greater priority on benefiting others/society instead.
> Similar to other professions - engineering and medicine for example
Those other professions don't get paid nearly as much though
>and deserve a slice of the pie.
...and deserve a fair slice of the pie.
deleted
That's literally what they said...? (that is, engineering and medicine are professions of dedicated learning)
My apologies, I've been up for 18hrs today
Perhaps it's the meaning of the word "similar" that is giving you trouble.
People generally get paid the amount that it costs to find someone else to do their job¹
It is very easy to find someone else to be a "rater". Certainly easier than it is to find another software engineer
You can argue SWE wages are inflated but comparing them to someone testing whether YouTube search returns the right results is inaccurate and feels disingenuous
"Fairness" is a vague concept which nobody can agree on. It's definitely not as easily observable as, say, the marginal cost of replacing a worker
---------------
1. This also happens to be a helpful framework for establishing "value", beyond the context of labor. For instance: how much is a company worth? The amount it would cost to replace them if they were taken out of the picture
By that logic, Sundar's pay is completely justified, as well as the pay cuts for Software Engineers, as more and more people become software engineers every day and available pool of workers continues to increase.
You don’t think they could find a competent CEO for, say, $100M?
They probably could find "a competent CEO", but that's not the bar, and it doesn't make sense to do so, because of the oversized impact and risks. If you're 99% certain that a person is as competent as the current CEO and 1% they're a dud like Carly Fiorina, then saving a measly $100m is not worth the enormous risk. And if you've got a candidate that makes you certain that they would be even slightly more competent than Pichai, then it would be worth paying an extra $100m to get them; if CEO A can get e.g. 1% more efficiency than CEO B (for example, by being more aggressive at laying off people) then that's easily worth that money.
You can't be certain of any of this, though, without a time machine to do some A/B testing.
Well the whole argument here by a big section of comments -- if not the majority -- including Googlers is "they haven't found one in Sundar."
I think finding a great CEO for the particular strategy and company is harder than we all think. (Yes I know the fault of the previous sentence -- it was on purpose.)
You don't think you could find a competent software engineer for $80k?
Sure can.
A race to the bottom for engineers at the same time there’s ever-increasing CEO pay is gross. That’s the point.
No chance if the competitor next door pays $300k
Depending on the field: No. Depends also on the definition of "competent."
Well, yeah. Experience with multibillion companies is lottery, knowing software a commodity.
Software engineers are the only highly paid professionals that can convince themselves they are worth less than the going market rate. Not sure i've seen this common sentiment in banking, law, medicine, real estate, or high $ sales.
Maybe in the US, but around the world it us usually just a decent job. The main problem is not the engineers being overpaid, is the rampant inequality that the west has been experiencing without anyone doing anything.
The situation is crazy right now. Engineers are not overpaid. The other jobs should have a better pay, while the CEOs should be paid a lot less.
I never understand why well paid SWEs feel guilty instead of realize that being able to live comfortably if you're working most of your waking day should be the baseline accepted state for society.
Heck, from my perspective other professions are highly underpaid. I know a couple of friends who work in healthcare as medical proffesionals (nurses, doctors etc), their wages (especially of nurses) are atrocious compared to the value to society they provide.
Definitely. Everybody in education and public health should be paid a looooot more.
> While I agree that CEOs are overpayed, I think the same applies to software engineers.
You know who is really overpaid? Landlords. They are the reason everything in Silicon Valley is so damn expensive. I'd gladly take a pay cut if the "landlord association of america" would collectively take a pay cut of their own. That will make this place slightly more affordable.
You know who else is really overpaid? A good chunk of the healthcare industry. My healthcare expenses are by far my highest money drain other than rent.
Except engineers bring value.
If engineers are to be paid less, then where should the profit go?
Profits go up. Sh*t goes down.
The money has to go somewhere. Why don't you want it to go to the employees?
> I think the same applies to software engineers. Software Engineering has been a pay/perk bubble for years
IMHO the reason is because American tech companies are located in cities with insane costs of living.
If Silicon Valley wants to save some serious money on salary, bribe and cajole state and local governments to change housing policy.
Totally agree. Tech salary bubble is going to burst soon. As a software engineer myself, I've already started looking for a plan B.
Found anything good? I’ve had a few ideas over the years, but they all involve expensive school I’d need an high salary to even afford.
I'm thinking of getting into construction. The only other classmates from high school who are making as much as me, or even more are those into real estate.
We have a tendency to think that things that are otherwise pretty universal don't apply to us. This results in people have very individualistic philosophies. Mantras like "work hard" place responsibility on the individual.
Google is a money printing machine having net annual income of ~$60B? It's profit per employee is utterly insane. Yet despite that there was a "need" for layoffs.
You'll find no shortage of defenders for the layoffs. Talk of cutting "the fat". Tell me: who decides what most of these people work on? Is it the individual? Or leadership? How amny executive leaders have gone as a result of need for belt-tightening? And whatever you think of Sunday (personally: not a lot), what makes this one man worth $226M/year? Sending out the traditional "thoughts and prayers" and "full responsibility" email seems to have not hurt him in the slightest.
These layoffs are nothin gmore than an attack on labor costs. It makes the remaining employees work harder (fearing further layoffs) as job functions of those eliminated are added to them rather than backfilled, less likely to ask for or get raises and it will make hiring cheaper as there is more avilable labor.
Just like the Steve Jobs anti-poaching collusion, this is a coordinated effort. Despite efforts to appear otherwise, these tech companies aren't on your side. They're on the shareholders side. You are simply an unfortunate line item under "expenses". So at least people are learning the lesson that they are completely expendable and there is no loyalty so absolutely no loyalty should be given to the company. Loyalty has to be reciprocal.
It actually doesn't have to be this way [1]. Additionally, layoffs tend to be traumatic for both the people affected and those that remain. Cost savings are overstated once you factor in severance packages, possible litigation, psychic damage to remaining employees and the cultural loss of trust from the "distraction".
Any genuine need to reduce costs could be better handled by across the board pay cuts.
[1]: https://www.polygon.com/2013/7/5/4496512/why-nintendos-sator...
And a bunch of us were making fun of him recently in the 60 Minutes / AI thread... (me included)
CEO pay is a market rate. This is not much different than complaining about the price point of gas, or milk, or eggs.
You can describe it as being too high in your opinion, or not worth it in your opinion, but that's completely different than pretending that its not being set by the market (and approved by the board) weighing myriad inputs. And btw, one of those inputs is...the ability to successfully tighten the belt and restructure costs to hit numbers.
Make the case to fire Pichai if you want, I'm fine with that, but recognize that you're going to pay "replacement cost" at the same rate or higher for someone else. That's showbiz baby.
He is paid significantly more than better-performing CEOs like Cook and Nadella.
Seems like they’re underpaid :)
you're going to pay "replacement cost"at the same rate or higher for someone else
How do you know this is true? This is an assertion you are making, but the evidence is to the contrary given significantly lower compensation for Microsoft or Apple's CEO.
Very unpopular opinion sadly. The most common argument I’ve heard is, “Just hire me! I’d do it for way less!” As if running a company employing ~150k people into the ground to make a quick buck is morally better than letting a hyper-competent professional run the operation and make “too much” money.
I have mostly worked for companies whose ARR is 5-10% of this guy's pay. And their CEOs usually have a bigger ego!
As a googler, I believe that googlers should be paid top of market. I love to see my fellow Sundar getting bank
You can be as angry as you want, but anger isn't going to do anything.
They can "fuck around and find out" all they want because they know that they are so powerful they will never have to find out.
They know they'll never have to face a tech union or deal with laborers sitting at the big boys negotiating table.
It's funny to me that no one complained about Sundar's pay when things were going swimmingly well.
why is that funny at all? It didn't coincide with layoffs at that time.
One of the first things that someone that gets laid off tries to do is understand the reasons for the conditions that prompted the lay-off.
One could -- somewhat reasonably -- divide the number of yearly salaries into 226 million and become quite outraged.
Is a single CEO worth that many jobs? That's the true question that creates outrage, not whether or not he was paid well.
If the jobs were never at stake the outrage would not exist.
I explain this without any outrage myself in this matter; a contractual payout has little to do with whatever current employment climate may exist -- but I can understand where the outrage originates.
> Is a single CEO worth that many jobs?
This question is a sign of not understanding how business works.
If you work hard, put all your hours in, and strive for excellence, he’ll get another island next year
Google doesn't even respect it's shareholders, only the people who get awarded shares. Most of the share buybacks go to preventing the newly minted shares from dropping the stock price.
Apple does actually respect it's shareholders...probably because it's hard to hoodwink Berkshire Hathaway.
https://www.epsilontheory.com/stock-buybacks-and-the-monetiz...
similar thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35809807
Googlers:
if you don't like how Google works, vote with your feet
you'll never own enough shares to get on the mic at an annual meeting, leaving is your only recourse
He was promised this pay in his contract just like the employees contract where they signed it.
Amazing how much failing to keep up with competitors, evolve core business will get you.
How much of Google’s valuation is Sundar, how much is inflation of asset values to keep asset owners ahead of everyone else, how much is a decade of cheap money?
Imagine making a million a week.
/brain explodes
And for some, imagining $150k a year makes their brain explode.
Also imagine many people on the internet hating on you. I'm not at all sure that's worth a million a week.
People need to get over themselves. You're not entitled to a job.
I wonder what it's like being rich. :thinking emoji:
Being rich, you can buy more and bigger things. You don't have to.
Rich people still have health problems, interpersonal problems, and also: everyone wants their money.
Source: I have some rich friends.
What a genuinely vulgar comp package.
Two words. Tone deaf.
Unionise.
Hating capitalism is one thing. Being clueless how it works is childish.
200M over 3 years for the CEO of the most consequential tech company on the planet is peanuts. Pop artists make similar money scantily clad and squeezing autotune
>Pop artists make similar money scantily clad and squeezing autotune
Which pop artist is making anywhere near 220M in take home over 3 years? 70M/year is Taylor Swift numbers, and shes the highest earning female artist ever.
Taylor Swift
Saying 'Pop artists make similar money' and then using the highest paid female artist ever is kind of misleading.
Why? It's not like Google is average, either
>>Pop artists make similar money scantily clad and squeezing autotune
I wasn't the one that made the implication that Taylor Swift's lifetime revenue was "peanuts"
I'm not following, and rereading the thread now it looks like it's been edited to the point of not making sense. I thought the thread was something like:
> What pop artist makes that much?
>> Swift
>>> But she's the top of pop artists, that's not a fair comparison (implied: because google should be paying a more "normal" amount)
In which case "but Google is the top of tech" would be a fair counterpoint. But if the argument is that even the top of pop artists doesn't come close, then... I'm not sure what argument we're having, actually, but yes, it's a different point.
>scantily clad and squeezing autotune
The implication is that 220M is peanuts because pop artists who just sell sex and use autotune make that kind money. Describing Taylor swift as someone who "squeeze autotune" is ridiculous; Taylor Swift has arguable done more than Sundar.
Are pop stars who "dress sexy and abuse autotune" making sundar money? Does Taylor Swift fit that profile? How did we go from "scantily clad and squeezing autotune" to "actually I meant elite popstars"? You have a guy making 3-4x more than his peers (at Microsoft and Apple, who CEO, despite performing better than Sundar took a pay cut!), being compared to the highest grossing entertainer of all time.
You forget that Microsoft tried to hire Sundar to be CEO. Sundar has job opportunities. He was an engineer. He was the PM of Google chrome.
Satya and Tim weren’t being courted by anyone when they took their jobs.
Drake
Taylor Swift (one of the saaviest and wealthiest pop stars of the last 20 years) has a total net worth of $500 million. $225 million over three years is significantly more than she’s ever made.
It's not the most consequential because of him. It was at that level when he got the job. Should the comp, in terms of who deserves the most money, go to the guy on top, or to the employees in proportion to their contribution?
CEO pay ratio is fucked in the US in any realm. It's just because those at the top have more leverage, they don't necessarily have more value.
start a company and pay your CEO less if you want. Sergey and Larry believe he should get 226M, are you saying they are misjudging the situation?
Typical libertarian viewpoint. By that logic everything a company does, every price and all current things going on in the job market are ok and what the invisible hand deems right and fair.
It's not about whether it makes sense to pay a CEO a lot, it's more about the disproportionate allocation of capital, and how it allows enough room for error that a CEO or exec could be outrageously overpaid and not harm them overall.
That's whataboutism. Googlers are comparing their pay (and layoffs) to the CEO's comp--pop artists are an entirely separate matter and Googlers may also feel those are paid too much
Said differently: I'm not saying they're right or wrong, just pointing out that they can also be upset over pop artists' pay
OpenAI is allegedly paying 5-20M for researchers. Shouldn’t CEO deserve 20x more?
What motivation will Sundar have if you pay him 200K?
The question isn't about motivation and you're comparing $5-20M to $0.2M when the argument is $200M is too much
The balanced answer then is to pay a CEO {something closer to $20M} and he will be motivated by {something closer to $20M} (plus their expectations of future comp).
Whether that's $20M or $40M or $60M or more is up for debate. Googlers are saying: "It's not $226M"
Sundar is make 3x more than Satya while doing fuck-all and coasting in his tenure.
There's a lot of room between 200k and 200M, and given that the company is laying people off and cutting costs, the CEO should share in that sacrifice.
Layoffs aren't a sacrifice, it's the CEO acting against the interests of the ex-employees but in the interests of shareholders (which is his job) and for that they get amply compensated by the shareholders.
Imposing a policy that if "the company is laying people off and cutting costs, the CEO should share in that sacrifice" is literally insane because it's counterproductive - it would explicitly motivate the CEO to avoid cutting costs and avoid laying people off (since that would cut their personal income), while shareholders want the exactly opposite thing, to motivate the CEO to be aggressive in cutting costs (including layoffs) whenever it allows to increase long-term profits, so any CEO compensation policy (which is set by the shareholders) should reflect that.
It is not necessarily in the interest of the shareholders if the compensation of top executives is so extreme as to starve a company of resources; this is especially the case because executives often only stay with a company a few years and are motivated to play games that produce short-term bumps in the stock price while harming long-term prospects (to pull this off the long term damage can't be completely obvious to analysts, but it often happens).
It's still extreme. I have no doubt that he works extremely hard but what are shareholders getting for a 226M$ compensation instead of a 100M$ one?
What is his special skill set?
The fact that there’s no TLDR of his skill set is his skill set.
If you like capitalism so much, then an artist having their income more clearly directly proportional to their output than some ceo definitely deserves a greater % of the profit.
Also, minimizing the effort it takes to become a pop artist and being prude is such a cliche.
Is $225M a lot for CEO of big corporation? I genuinely don't know. What is the average pay?
Tim Apple - 99M [1]
Satya Nadella - 54M [2]
[1] https://www1.salary.com/Tim-Cook-Salary-Bonus-Stock-Options-...
[2] https://www1.salary.com/Satya-Nadella-Salary-Bonus-Stock-Opt...
Lol @ Tim Apple. For those who don't know, Trump called Tim Cook "Tim Apple" in a conference once.
It is more than the profit (as listed by Fortune) of about 260 companies in the Fortune 1000: https://fortune.com/ranking/fortune500/2022/search/ . In other words, Fortune lists about 260 companies in the Fortune 1000 as having a profit of less than 225 million in 2022.
AP says average for large orgs is about 12 million.
https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-financial-markets-...
it's a lot. Here's top 100. https://www.equilar.com/reports/90-table-highest-paid-ceos-2...
Pichai is not on the list because he gets paid big every 3 years I think. It's not a good look either way.
It's a lot obviously.
Pichai needs to go, Google is in dire need of someone that can shake things up.
I disagree about putting all these things together.
The layoffs and reduction in perks were sorely needed in Big Tech given all the fat that has been milking it for years.
The CEO pay is definitely egregious and should be called out (and those at other companies should also be called out).